ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with general reservations about the nature of corpus evidence before dealing with the ELF school of thought that has suggested that ELT corpora tends to privilege the native speaker. The native speaker corpora have played an important role in the debates as to what model of English it is appropriate to offer in the classrooms given current and predicted patterns of use of English worldwide. A further aspect of the ELF debate needs to consider whether there is a qualitative difference between native speaker varieties and lingua franca varieties. Willis explains thedistinction between accuracy, the ability to operate a stable grammatical system comprehensibly and conformity, to mean adherence to native speaker grammatical rules. It was in the context of the debate about the relevance of native speaker corpora in contemporary ELT that Timmis carried out a survey of learners and teachers attitudes for native speaker norms in general, and native speaker spoken norms in particular.
